>>>That sort of economy is achievable with a ten year old petrol VW Polo, *without* all the heavy complex hybrid stuff

Unfortunately it would fail the updated U.S. LEV-II standards (too much NOx). The reason MPGs have been dropping in newer cars is because the engine is being tuned to run richer to pass emissions tests.

The best petrol car right now that can pass these tough regs is the Civic HF at 45mpg. And the Chevy CruzeEco at 44. That's very close to what the Civic and Prius hybrids do.

>>>>>Considering emissions on automobiles have been reduced by 99+% (CO, NOx, HC) since the 1970's>>>>CO2 emissions from cars have been reduced? Highly doubtful.

Somebody can't read. He never once listed CO2.As for sources one only needs to look at the EPA which had very lenient standards in the 70s but gradually strengthened them over time. The current standards only allow 1/100th as much pollution as a car built in 1975. (1/1000th in the case of NOx.)

You should look at greenercars.org. They not only look at upstream emissions but also the cost of drilling for oil, shipping it to you gas station, and also downstream pollution (shipping the junk car to China for recycling). Also CO2. Here are these cars scores out of 100:

Mitsubishi myEV 58Toyota Prius C 56Civic CNG 55Leaf 55The highest non-hybrid cars are the Scion IQ at 53 and the Toyota Yaris at 50. Probably they score that high because both are SULEVs and PZEVs.

>>>What a stupid thing to say. I'm more likely to buy a Windows 8 tablet over the two current leaders as iOS is garbage (really, I don't know how anyone puts up with it), and I don't care for Android (I don't like the clunky UI and hate the pitiful dev tools). I seriously doubt that I'm unique.

Probably not unique given your current location (Washington, near Seattle, Microsoft cubicle).;-)

>>>Any spacecraft gives off heat, and infrared radiation is easy to spot in clumps

Not when it's 3 light-minutes away. You're talking about finding a tiny carrier-sized object at the distance of Mars, and it could be anywhere. On the same plane as you, or above you, or below you, or even behind you.

Why are so many B5 Actors dying so young? The Star Trek crew lived on-and-on-and-on. Nobody dies until the around 2000..... 30 years after the show. Meanwhile B5 has lost several actors in just the first 12 years.

It appears you have this backwards.According to JMS it was the *B5 crew* that contacted NASA and asked for technical assistance to portray accurate ship maneuvering. The fact Starfury acts like a real space vessel is probably because the NASA advisor was rejecting early designs & offering advice on how to make it better.

Not hardly. When a record is *brand new* it has some high frequency harmonics (upto 25,000 hertz), but those quickly get rubbed-off the record by the needle. Of course being analog it will never be a perfect amplification of the little record ridges into audible sound. There's always distortion. PLUS vinyl adds *extra* sounds to a recording, like the hiss of the needle rubbing the record and the humm of the motor. It also suffers wow and flutter since it doesn't spin at a constant rate. (And of course no record can touch Super Audio CD or DVD-audio with approximately 0 to 96000 Hz range.)